Posted
by
kdawsonon Sunday February 01, 2009 @03:49PM
from the expectation-of-privacy dept.

notany writes "Nokia may be too big a company for Finland (a country of 5 million people). It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will. After Nokia was caught red-handed, twice, snooping on its employees (first 2000-2001, second 2005), the company started a relentless lobbying and pressure campaign against politicians to push what the press has been calling 'Lex Nokia' or the 'snooping law.' This proposed law would allow employers to investigate the log data of employees' e-mails, legalizing the kind of snooping that Nokia had engaged in. Parliament's Constitutional Law Committee asked the opinions of eight legal experts, and all opined that the proposed law is unconstitutional. The committee ignored all the advice and declared the proposal constitutional." An anonymous reader adds a link to an AFP story reporting that Nokia has threatened to pull out of Finland unless the law passes.

The country code for Finland used to be SF, standing for Suomi-Finland, as Suomi is how we Finns call Finland. The ongoing joke was that SF really stood for Soviet Finland due to our somewhat submissive relationship with the USSR.

The ongoing joke was that SF really stood for Soviet Finland due to our somewhat submissive relationship with the USSR.

Anyone calling the Finns "submissive" towards the USSR has never bothered to read a history book. If the Finns were submissive, Finland wouldn't even exist as a country today. The Finns stood up to Stalin [wikipedia.org] and resisted his aggressive designs -- they managed to stalemate the Soviets for more than three months even though they were outnumbered 4 to 1 (in men, the disparity in tanks/aircraft/artillery was even worse) and kept their sovereignty.

Here's a tidbit for anyone that tells you the Finns were submissive: Of the European nations involved in WW2 only three managed to survive the war without having their capital occupied by the enemy: the UK, the Soviet Union and Finland.

Do read up on finlandization, then. It's what we have now towards the US, the EU and NATO instead of what we used to have after the war and until 1991, when it was with regard to the USSR. Most everyone fucking hates that our so-called elected leaders are entirely spineless towards power of any kind.

We do have a bit of national pride with regard to the winter war. It's mostly misplaced: the main reason why that war went so well was that Stalin set the invasion up as a PR operation first and foremost. His tr

It's mostly misplaced: the main reason why that war went so well was that Stalin set the invasion up as a PR operation first and foremost. His troops had no supplies, no supply lines, not even proper winter wear. And yet they managed to conquer significant areas of land, which for some reason is billed as a "defensive victory"

Well, like most Russian "victories" they were successful by drowning their opponent in Russian blood. The Russians took nearly half a million casualties to conquer 9% of a country that wasn't even a 50th of the size of the Soviet Union. One Russian general was quoted as saying "We've won just enough ground to bury our dead"

The finnish army subsequently went on, encouraged by the "victory", to get their arses kicked alongside the foremost military might of the time, Nazi Germany.

I don't know how you can say you got your asses kicked when you were the only non-western country to come out of the war with your sovereignty intact. You did better than the Baltic States, Poles or even the Germans. Have some national pride and don't be so dismissive of your accomplishments. You held onto your sovereignty against the most ruthless power of the day with little outside support despite overwhelming odds.

I'd love to get to come to Finland some day and see some of the memorials and museums related to the Winter and Continuation Wars. Where would you suggest I go?

Call it what you will; I like to call it "less than being conquered". Don't get me wrong -- it's vastly preferable to the other thing, but it's not a victory. Calling it such a thing is a leftover of the old cultural homogeneity that took a beating in the post-Soviet-breakup crash and the recession that followed. Reminding people of the lies they were fed during that time will get you weird looks, after which whatever you say goes in one ear and out the other.

Now with regard to the Quest for All Land Between The Border and The Urals, also known as Operation Barbarossa. I'll say that it was a pretty smart tactical move at the time: it wasn't all that certain that Nazi Germany wasn't going to win (though it's painfully obvious in retrospect). Taken this way, it was a method for hedging our bets and hopefully avoiding both Stalin's and Hitler's purges, whichever would end up victors.

Still, attacking Russia, even during the summer, was nothing short of madness brought on by jingoism and the belief that as allies of Nazi Germany we'd be invincible. ("What Soviet arms industries? They're just a bunch of ignorant farmers, aren't they. We'll have their cake just like the last time.") Between the wars, speaking publicly of peace and goodwill would get one locked up for treason. Not a nice time from a civil rights perspective.

As for museums, gee, I have really no idea. There's a museum of military aviation somewhere, and one about historical armor in Parola. The national museum in Helsinki has a permanent display of pre-independence arms and armor (as in personal armor. plate.). For this, you're really asking the wrong guy. Perhaps wikitravel would serve you better?

Call it what you will; I like to call it "less than being conquered". Don't get me wrong -- it's vastly preferable to the other thing, but it's not a victory

I think it's the best a nation the size of Finland could expect against a nation the side of the Soviet Union. What would have been the better alternative?

Still, attacking Russia, even during the summer, was nothing short of madness brought on by jingoism and the belief that as allies of Nazi Germany we'd be invincible

I don't know what I'd call it exactly but I can't really say as I blame the Finns for wanting to retake the lands that were stolen by the Soviet Union. You'll note that the United States never declared war on Finland and even sent congratulations when the Finns initially liberated Karelia. It's a shame that geography and geopolitics didn't align a little bit differently, but given the hand Finland was dealt I still think you did pretty well.

However, now that I gave it a bit more consideration, I guess simply not folding before conquest noises from the USSR was pretty impressive given the times. Quite a few countries would have, and later on did.

I suppose in one way we ended up pioneering the concept of turning an "open and shut war, it'll be done before breakfast next monday" into a quagmire and a political embarrassment. That's the characteristic bloody-mindedness for you I guess.

Anyone calling the Finns "submissive" towards the USSR has never bothered to read a history book. If the Finns were submissive, Finland wouldn't even exist as a country today. The Finns stood up to Stalin [wikipedia.org] and resisted his aggressive designs

And that is when they were allied with Hitler's Germany.

Nevertheless this law is absurd as much as absurd are part of finnish costumes. A country where there is no privacy and you are eligible to get anyone's identity and tax forms with a SMS isn't a country protecting his citizens right to private life (unless they are gipsies [countrystudies.us] of course).

The Finns stood up to Stalin and resisted his aggressive designs -- they managed to stalemate the Soviets for more than three months even though they were outnumbered 4 to 1 (in men, the disparity in tanks/aircraft/artillery was even worse) and kept their sovereignty.

The difference is that the employees can quit and get other jobs and the customers can buy other products.

Absolutely! Would you like Exxon gas or Mobile gas for your car? What kind of Microsoft computer do you want to use at work? Would you prefer AT&T spying on your, or Comcast?

How about working freelance or starting your own business? Just make sure you don't ever do anything that a large corporation doesn't want you to do, or you will be held [1]personally liable! Also, don't get sick, because you won't have any health care! Who cares that our great leader, Big Brother, isn't held up to these standards? After all, he did such a great job last year, we personally gave him a 16.9 billion dollar bonus! I know that was the best $100 of my tax money I ever spent!

Even if you've never worked for a corporation in your life, you are still at the mercy of their whims when they buy politicians and laws (which they do constantly).

That still makes you a peon and the corporations the royalty anyway you look at it.

Maybe you can be the village blacksmith (Consultant) rather than the Baron's whipping boy (corporate programmer), but that still doesn't make you any less subject to the whims of the law put in place by the Royalty.

The difference is that the employees can quit and get other jobs and the customers can buy other products.

Yeah employees have choices; they can quit, they can go postal, they can suck cock, etc. Unfortunately the choices that most employees have are often just as negative or worse than doing nothing.

And yes, customers can stop buying from Walmart to stop the economic collapse of their towns. This doesn't happen for some strange economic reason. They (the smiling minimum wage Walmart Worker) will sell you the rope to hang yourself, and at bargain prices.

And yes, customers can stop buying from Walmart to stop the economic collapse of their towns.

Well, a town whose economy consists entirely of selling household goods is very much overdue for an economic collapse. By this logic, we should ban computers to keep the typewriter companies in business. Hell, Wal-mart generally pays a lot better than small locally-owned retailers in small towns. A lot of those places employ illegals, or work off the books and don't pay taxes.

Lawmakers, if you don't want to see your country on the leash of a business, stop worrying about your campaign losing its funding. Your job is to the people and their innate human rights.

Still, it's more important to keep our programmers fed and employed, rather than keeping the secrets about secretary's day lotion under lock and key.

The "true piracy hardcores" seem to be taking a break (anonymizers, etc), and now we are meddling with "soft" security. It's not the important kind of security, judging simply by the fact that anyone can get to that data if they wanted. I'm sure Nokia has had some bad exeriences with data leakage, and if they have the tools to home in on whoever did it, they sh

I'm saying: if nokia really thinks they need this, they can implement it inside their own IT infrastructure if they want. If that is the alternative to shipping the jobs to india / china, I'm all for it - because this scheme doesn't really hurt people who know how the system works, and can take precautions with mails they send. Amend this with "for personal emails use gmail", and it's as humane as needs to be.

Apparently an employee emailed confidential engineering documents to a competitor in China, and Nokia is unable to prevent themselves from investigating in an illegal manner.

Nokia would need to spy on the entire country of Finland then (and on a couple neighboring ones) because it takes a honest but misguided person, or a stupid person, to email confidential documents to a competitor from his desk at work, using company's email services. A real spy would copy the materials on a Flash disk, and encrypt t

I think you are looking at the quality of life of today's serfs and declaring them not-serfs simply because they have modern conveniences and distractions. This only makes them happier, very busy and distracted serfs... serfs with "something to lose" are less likely to fight back than serfs with nothing to lose. This is a great lesson that government and business has learned over the centuries.

My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked. I guess it's a Samsung this time. If only all the 13 year old girls sending a million texts a month and those jackasses constantly yakking into their mobiles actually cared about corporate ethics, then such a boycott may actually be meaningful.

Well that's effing ridiculous, isn't it? Sony-Ericsson has nothing to do with Sony-BMG.For all intents and purposes, they're completely separate companies. Just with (partially) the same owner, and the same brand name.

Why would you 'punish' Sony-Ericsson for a business decision they had nothing to do with at all?

Sony is one of the worst companies in the world. This is even worse than normal, because they used to be one of the greatest engineering companies of all time (much like HP), they fell from grace when they started doing stupid shit like handicapping their MD music device and all other devices, including root kits on CDs, pretending they support MP3 when they didn't, creating their own non-standard and inferior memory format, etc...

My mobile phone is due for an upgrade. It looks like Nokia join Sony-Ericcson on the blacklist; they can all get fucked.

You are not a frequent reader? In the last few weeks, Nokia put Qt out under LGPL. The good karma earned through that action alone should be enough for us to ignore strongarm political tactics (and small PR disasters) for a while.

If you have committed a crime, tried to blackmail the government trying to legalize your criminal actions. No as person, I do not think you would be allowed to leave, and I don't think they will just take your passport.

Solution: Nokia is attempting to extort the gov't to draw a custom law for them.

So the gov't nationalizes Nokia as part of a law they would draw up instead that states that Corps attempting extort the gov't should be nationalized.

Sure it doesn't sound fair and is, itself, a scary precedent. But it's no scarier then letting Nokia run a privately owned country and would certainly teach the CEO a thing or two about fucking with the people who grew his company up.

- Law to force phone manufacturers to make their keys on their phones large enough for an adult male to operate without using a thimble

- Law to make phones water resistant. Currently all Nokia phones have a minature water detector linked to a self destruct mechanism

- Law to ensure annoying bugs in firmware are dealt with in a timely manner. No, not by releasing an updated model that you have to buy at full price because you're still on contract with the buggy phone.

- Law to ensure that the loudspeaker function doesn't change (and in particular isn't replaced with a cancel call button) between making a call and the call being connected.

- Law to ensure the phone doesn't require speakerphone to be activated before a human being is able to actually hear what's said. Phones shouldn't be built for magical leprechauns that live inside them

- Law to ensure that the duration of a call is logged in the call log, not just for the last call.

Who knows? By the time you get there, they might have joined the rest of the world and no longer care about their citizen's privacy.

It's looking that way.

But who am I, as an American, still subject to George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales' so-called Patriot Act with all the warrantless wiretaps, no notice search warrants, gag orders, etc, to criticize any other country in any way for not caring about citizen privacy?

Well, the Finland has nowadays one of most stricts privacy laws. What Nokia wants to do, is the thing US companies do routinely every day claiming that they has to do it to protect shareholder value.

The law at present proposed form is nowhere close to laws (if one exist) in many "civilized" countries, not to talk about totalitarian countries. Like one not-so-democratic east of Finland, and one we-listen-your-communication west of Finland.

It is actually quite funny, that the existing law is known as "Lex Sonera" (Sonera was a former state-own telco now part of TeliaSonera). The former CEO of Sonera wanted to find out which employees leaked information to press by getting call records of many people (board members, other employees and journalists). This obviously backfired and we got one of most strict implementations of EU privacy laws.

Now Nokia with other companies wants to get some of those rights back (earlier the law was unclear for computer communications, but the right of privacy existed there) they unofficially had before that. Of course, we as citizens and employees do not want to give that away. Even if I need to do extra tricks when I do my work to keep user data private.

I personally like very much that Finnish law tries to protect employees: often the situation in working life is quite uneven and the employer has upper hand in many cases. Laws put some limits on that, even if cannot protect in all cases.

While the right for employee to monitor your net usage while you are using employer's systems is up for debate, this bill is much worse.

The bill doesn't mention e-mail, or workplace.

It only contains words of "community subscriber" and "identifying information, but not content".

So, universities and schools can monitor what students do on the Internet. Over any protocol, not just e-mail. Who do they call on VoIP. What websites they visit. Same applies for libraries. Or even community housing.

[...] So, universities and schools can monitor what students do on the Internet. Over any protocol, not just e-mail.

That's fine by me, all they have to do is break my 8192 bit rsa key (on USB drive, along with a portable-apps PuTTY, firefox, thunderbird, and other 'goodies'), or figure out a way to keep me from tunneling other protocols over SSH. They could lock down USB ports, I guess. Although I'll be a bit ticked when I have to go back to carrying live CDs on disk. I guess they could also confiscate the half dozen USB drives that I usually carry... and hope that none of them are hacksaws when them plug them in to a

I was shooting from the hip to make a point and wound up at Epic Fail.

You've got me thinking now, what would be the most secure way to handle a private key on a campus computer (I live off campus, so I use one of them about once a semester)? I guess boot a live cd first, then use the key... or keep two keys and use the first one (a throw away) to SSH to a known secure host where you have your normal key? That way, at least you've gotten your good key encrypted and you can always revoke th

On a system that isn't laced with hardware keyloggers(or worse, you don't even want to think about dealing with a system where your OS is running under an always-on malicious hypervisor) a liveCD should solve most of your problems. That'll get rid of software keyloggers and any software agents grabbing files off your USB keys. For the storage of keys specifically, you really want a hardware security token, with onboard key storage and processing, so your key never actually leaves the device(smartcards and v

So, universities and schools can monitor what students do on the Internet.

In Sweden, and to a similar extent in Finland, there is no privacy within public institutions - such as universities.
All public documents (meaning those produced by _any_ public institution) are public record unless specifically ruled otherwise (e.g. national security, relations to a foreign power, etc).

As a Swedish university employee, all my email at my university address is a matter of public record. Not only can my boss read

Basically, no agreement or normal law can infringe on the rights given in the constitution, unless there is a law that is passed either by 5/6 majority of the parliament, or by 2/3 majority by two parliamants(with general election in between) that says that this special case is ok.

One of the rights in the constitution is cummunications privacy.

The biggest controversy about this law is that it is going to be passed as normal law, not constitutional law.

Does anyone here really think you could run a large company without being able to monitor emails sent by company representatives, using company resources? Does this really seem right to you?

Yes. If you have reason to suspect the individual, you can ask him to turn over the e-mails or ask him to leave. Going behind someone's back and spying on them creates undue stress and a backstabbing working environment where noone can trust anyone. Been there. Done that.

A corporation doesn't have the right to step on the rights of individuals just because the individual has been granted the "privilege" to make them money.

If the government isn't supposed to do it on a whim, why should the company be all

This story has been seen as provocative, given this lily white context, so it's actually quite interesting to see where this goes, especially as we're simultaneously observing the story unfold around the 2% vote fail issue [slashdot.org].

I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search. Compared with the USA under King George and Prince Chaney, any country with "laws blocking companies from monitoring employee emails" sounds like a privacy paradise.

It seems that Nokia's lobbyists can push an unconstitutional law through the legislature at will.

I know we're all for humanizing these collective fictions called corporations. Even going so far as to equate them to real people in law.

Now, let's be realistic: someone inside Nokia decided that they personally wanted this law. I guess it's nice to have none of the responsibility for your actions yet the power to have them executed. Some single manager held a meeting and told people to do this, even though it is the whole company that will be judged based on this.

While the employees are paid to be tools of the company, it is a single, living an breathing idiot somewhere inside Nokia that wants to play voyeur. Who? Unless it's a VP or CO level person, we may never know. All we know is that someone might be trying to stop the flow of confidential information out of the company.

I'm surprised that the employment contracts for those employees did not stipulate that all employee email passing through their systems was subject to search.

Perhaps, in Finland, one cannot sign away this particular right.

After all, many employment contracts in the US specify that one's job is "at-will" and one can be fired at any time for any reason (mine does). However, signing such a contract still leaves you with rights that the government considers as inviolate, such as the right not to be fired due to your race. No amount of signing, even if the contract specifically states "You sign away this specific right" can take some enumerated rights from you.

Perhaps in Finland, the right not to be spied upon by one's employer is such a right. I don't know that, but if Nokia has multiple times been chastised for doing this, one might assume that could be the case.

You are right: it is not possible to give "you can read all my email" right to employer. If, for example, you are leave (or sick) and your manager thinks that there is a critical information in your mailbox, he cannot just ask system admin to open your mailbox and get that message.

To read the message, the employer must first try to contact you to open the message. If that fails, then there is certain procedure how a needed message is first searched (basicly email subject, sender and date are only allowed)

Also, does anyone who cares about privacy in any degree use corporate email for anything personal? I think it's reasonable to expect that your nokia.com account should only be used for your official nokia business. Also, corporate emails are typically much less convenient than e.g. gmail anyway, and with limited quotas. Do you really want to use them when you don't have to?

Well, a commenter on a Finnish news site replied to similar criticisms by claiming that some of Nokia's design departments are locked out of the internet, and also their computers encrypt anything put on USB drives etc. so that the files can not be viewed on third-party computers. According to the commenter, this effectively makes company e-mail the only way of sending out digital copies of design documents.

Now, it seems unlikely that, even if this is all true, the security policies of these departments w

Actually I see the opposite trend. Maybe just in CA. Most people are locking down their networks. I, in fact, did so after the RIAA starting suing people based on IP addresses. I'd like to provide free, limited (bandwidth-wise) internet to the whole neighborhood, and I'm certainly capable of securing my LAN while doing so, but the law is just not in place to protect my doing so.

So I think the default for "please-set-up-my-internets" guy is going to be to enable encryption until society catches up.

For years I've felt bad for, well for example Americans for corporations having way too much power over there. Now even at my very own home country, the employer of my many friends of mine pulls shit like this, it's unbelievable.

For what? To spy their employees? What the fuck?!

Does Nokia even have the slightest competitive edge on innovation at any frontier? No it does not. In the past few years they've only managed to start copying others.. So I guess they are afraid their employees sending emails telling everyone that they are now starting to copy Apple or RIM or whoever employs innovative people. That's like sending answers to simple math questions like 1+1=2.

The law itself, so called "Lex Nokia" is bad, it's really bad. Any organization can, after it's passed start surveillance on their employees after filing some stupid form. Police won't have any control over these operations. You aren't even required to fill the god damn form, you can do it later on and pay a small fine!

Can you spell out obscene in some other way? This is ridiculous. I do not want to live here anymore if Nokia gets it's way. To hell with them, Finland would be a much better place without them. Poor, maybe a bit shaken but it surely isn't worth of losing every last sense of law in this country.

Just if someone would make sure to collect them every cent of development grants they've received in the past years before they go.

1) I pulled out all of my CISCO gear when I first started working at a local logistics supplier, that was chuck FULL of CISCO. When my boss asked me WHAT WAS I DOING? I simply said, "Well, we have all of these old computers and they can act as gateways, vpn routers, and VoIP servers for our desktops. Why upgrade to equipment we cannot reuse in the budget for other things, or easily fix just by loading BSD or Linux on it?"

But it was all a lie of course...OR

Was it?

I replaced all of the CISCO gear because CISCO, was providing the Chinese government the means to kill and torture anyone they do not like online.

I kept that part to myself as my Boss loves CISCO. He likes to keep his job more though, so he left me do it.

I still buy from Linksys because I need WRT54GL's, which I load with that awesome DD-WRT firmware.

If anyone can recommend a better device I can buy from a company that doesn't help foreign governments hunt down citizens on the internet, that would be great. WRT54GL though is a pretty nice piece of hardware.

CISCO, you suck.

2) Novell. Oh, well...what can I say? Back in the day when I was a Novell administrator, I thought Netware 5 was going to be better and provide a protected mode OS you can run apps on. Nope, I was betrayed. I thought Novell was going to get a nice protected memory architecture and they promised it would, so it would run better, with less ABENDS at 4AM in the morning. They never did deliver any of those promises. Sigh.

I get cranky thinking about the early morning trips into the office, sorry.

But the whole buying of SuSe, getting money above and below the table from a unknown source, eventually, to find out it was Microsoft was the straw that broke the GNU Oxen's back.

So, I ripped out all of my Novell servers, pulled out all of my SuSe servers, and well, my boss was a problem. He liked the SuSe desktop. A couple of days later his workstation wouldn't boot. (I wonder how that happened?)

So, installed Fedora, and he loved it. I said "You know, Fedora is much more stable. We should install Fedora on all of our desktops and servers where we can and get rid of SuSe so you do not crash again.":-)

Called SuSe to tell them, "Tell Bill I said Hi the next time you give him a in the back room. Oh, and one more thing, YAST SUCKS."

Then there is the whole Icaza thing...with the.Net crap SuSe loads on the boxes..Net is crap in the Microsoft world, so NOW Miguel gets the brilliant idea to make CRAP PORTABLE, and open up a distro such as SuSe to patent litigation!

Yeah, Novell...

YOU SUCK...

IT.

3) Now...SIGH. Nokia. Is it not bad enough, we have politicians who are stupid and remove more and more of our rights on a daily basis? No, you say? You say you want to speed that process up and sovereign governments where you do business are annoying?

That is really too, bad, Nokia.

Tomorrow, it just so happens, I will be calling our cellular carrier and complaining about the reception of these Nokia phones we currently use. (Not really, they work fine. It just begins the process I need to get rid of them out of the organization at all 20 locations in Wisconsin.)

But, make no doubt, after I sabotage, and kill these phones, we will be buying different ones at the end of our contract this May.

Huge multinational corporations are not the problem, they are the symptom! The core problem is government. NOT the current Finnish government, per se, but the system of government itself. It is a system that tries to organize society through centralized planning and direction. Our modern societies are far too complex to effectively manage in this way, and it leads to all sorts of unintended consequences. One such consequence is big business. Free markets do not create huge corporate behemoths, because marke

Listen son, in the Real World people don't have a choice in whether they can work to feed themselves or not. Unfortunately work takes up a disproportionate amount of time in one's life (despite computers and robots which were supposed to eliminate the need to work). Companies need to start accommodating workers instead of spying on them, stressing them out, and treating them like shit. A company like Nokia that will go out of its way to break the law in order to harm its employees should be forced to nationalize its assets (or at least have a suitable and similar punishment), unfortunately the people who run companies tend to be hypocrites and untrustful. We need to start spying on the executives of large companies, and not the other way around.

The problem with work mail is that we are quite heavy unionized here in Finland (even in IT sector which - I've heard - isn't as unionized on the other side of the Ocean). The union's representatives have full right and reason to use their work address to communicate with other employees regarding business with the union.

Employers should really not be allowed to snoop on this. Same goes for other info that you are allowed to use your work mail to but the employer shouldn't be allowed to read. For example, I

The union's representatives have full right and reason to use their work address to communicate with other employees regarding business with the union.

Um, why is that? Here in the US, unions generally cannot use employer resources to conduct union business. That makes sense, and obviates the privacy concerns anyone might have. Is it really that hard to register a Gmail account?

It's pretty ludicrous that in Finland you can just take confidential company information and use your work email to send it to a competitor. Not only is your company not allowed to look at the content of the emails you send, but they cannot even investigate WHO IT WAS SENT TO. This makes sense how?

It's pretty ludicrous that in Finland you can just take confidential company information and use your work email to send it to a competitor.

If you want to sell confidential data to your company's competitor, it is very likely that you'll do it via your home internet account. Does it mean that Nokia should be able to read your private mail too?

It is some strange trend that companies become so paranoid. Treating employees like traitors will not help them in any way. Those who want to hurt the company will find the way to do it anyhow. For instance, good way to hurt your company is to ruin its public image by breaking laws and lobbying for ridiculous legislations.

In the US, we especially don't like tax-payer funded IT gear being used for union/political use.

The employer paid for it, they should get to dictate its use. If Nokia says "use work computers at own risk, we can see whatever you do on them", that is their prerogative. How'd you like it if you owned a company and employees were using the company vehicle for personal use...and YOU got in trouble for trying to get information about it? Nokia should leave Finland. A company SHOULD leave any place it finds a hostile environment.

Yeah, well, and that attitude has kept the US at the forefront of individual freedom and liberty... Like, oh, habeas corpus.. No wait, they did away with that.. OK, freedom from snooping on phone conversations... Oh, they did away with that too. Like the ability to watch a DVD on my computer, or share music with my friends. No, wait, can't do that either.

WHAT? You've got some strange ideas my friend. So how's that work exactly? Does the executive move overseas (boohoo)? The employees? How does a multinational company 'leave' a country? And what will they do with their employees who actually make the company anything more than just a VC Firm? Fire them? Then what? So they've got a nice Nokia Trademark and no one to do anything with it. Oh and watch their share price go to 0.

Cue endless stories about how the Finns beat the Soviets in the Winter war, even though they didn't actually win but rather lost 10% of their territory and a fifth of their industrial base.

Oh go fuck yourself. They did better than any other country (including Germany, I might add) did against the Soviet Union. Think you could do any better when fighting someone who has sixty times your landmass and fifty times your population?

You conveniently left out the fact that a number of law professors were asked for their expert opinion, and they unanimously said that the bill was unconstitutional. This expert opinion was then ignored by the politicians preparing the law.

This is not entirely unlike what happened with the copyright law (the so-called Lex Karpela) a few years back.

More than the leftist government bureaucrats, I'm worried about the right-wing politicians that are doing whatever their big-business masters want with total disregard to both public and expert opinion, the constitution and the principles of a democratic state.